NIGEL ROEBUCK

(This interview originally appeared in my 1990 book Grand Prix People)

During the Spanish Civil War one of Franco's generals, Emilio Mola, was leading four columns of troops against Madrid. In a radio broadcast Mola boasted that he had a 'fifth column' of sympathizers within Madrid who would support him in a rearguard action. Shortly after that a war correspondent named Ernest Hemingway wrote a play called The Fifth Column. Nowadays, in his Fifth Column in Autosport, Nigel Roebuck writes from behind the lines in Formula 1.

Like a war correspondent, Roebuck brings news of the in-fighting along pit lane and the intrigue in the paddock. He is the fans' man on the spot, passionate about the sport and sometimes amused, sometimes angered, by its players. In his introduction to a collection of his columns, published in a book, 'Inside Formula 1', Roebuck notes that he is fascinated by the pit lane 'scandal' and 'gossip.' And this fifth columnist makes no bones about the perspective of his point of view: 'Unbiased journalism, if it exists at all, is doubtless terribly worthy. But it sends me to sleep.' 

"At least I'm fairly nakedly unbiased.  I don't think I'm devious about it. For instance I am a blatant Prost fan, just like I was a blatant Villeneuve fan - even more so with Gilles. In those days in every press room I used to walk into a barrage of criticism about what I'd written.  People like Doodson would be saying, 'Villeneuve is a rock ape.'  And didn't I realize that?  And, what's the matter with me? 

"But I just always loved reading opinions.  I get bored with facts.  I love reading people's opinions of people.  I love reading profiles, whether it's film stars, or politicians, or whatever, especially if it's written by someone who's prepared to say, 'Well, I didn't think he was very interesting', or 'He can't laugh at himself.'  So I always try to get it across that I'm not necessarily saying A's a better driver than B.  What I'm saying is that I like A, and I don't like B, and this is why I like A."

Roebuck was just six years old when he discovered the first driver he liked. It was Jean Behra, who caught and passed Trintingant's Ferrari to win the 1954 Pau Grand Prix. Little Nigel saw it on BBC TV and was "absolutely spellbound." From the ages of 10 to 18 he attended private school, where his favourite subject was English, though he specialized in the extracurricular study of motor racing. As far as the boy Roebuck was concerned, those school years were merely a necessary interval to be endured until he joined his Formula 1 heroes.

"It never really dawned on me that I would be anything other than a racing driver. What else would I be? I hadn't quite worked out how this was going to happen, being a racing driver, but I did realise that you didn't leave school and a week later show up at Lotus and ask for a job.  And I thought well, I'll have to do something until I'm a Grand Prix driver, so I'd like to be a journalist." 

But, according to The Public School Appointments Board, Roebuck was ill-suited for the journalistic profession. He was interviewed by a career counsellor, who told him: "'Forget it, forget it.  I don't think from talking to you that you are the sort of person who could go and speak to a grieving widow six hours after her husband's been killed and ask her how she feels. I just don't think that's you.'  And I thought about that, I thought he's right actually, that isn't me, at all."

Roebuck joined a management training scheme with Bowaters, the paper company, and worked there for five years. Meanwhile, he continued grooming himself for his first choice of a career by enrolling as a pupil at a driving school at Brands Hatch. There, he came to realize he might not have the right stuff to be a Jean Behra. "I had all the classic signs of a kid who'd quite like to be a racing driver but isn't desperate enough. For instance, one of my grandmothers left me some money and I spent it on a Lotus Elan. I didn't spend it on anything to do with racing. So I think probably it had already sunk into my head by then, that either I didn't want it badly enough, or I wasn't good enough, or whatever."

So, if Roebuck was not to race himself then he would write about those who did and, ignoring the advice of the career counsellor, he fired off letters to racing magazines offering his services as a journalist. Only Autosport replied and he declined their suggestion of beginning as a cub reporter, covering club events. He wanted to start at the top, writing about Grand Prix racing, and he thought he saw an opportunity in Car & Driver magazine. He wrote a letter to the editorial offices, in New York, informing them that a particular Formula 1 story was terrible and that he, Nigel Roebuck, could do much better. The author of that letter is still amazed at his audacity.

"I mean, it's totally out of character.  It's just not in my character at all to do something like that. But I said, 'You can't afford to be without me any longer.' Car & Driver, to my astonishment, wrote back and said, 'Alright, if you think you're so clever, go to Barcelona on Sunday week and write us a report of the race, and if we like it we'll use it.' It amazed me and, since this was about 10 days before the race, it frightened me stupid!"

From his school geography lessons Roebuck knew approximately where the Iberian peninsula sat on the map but he had no idea of how to get to Montjuich Park in Barcelona, let alone how to report on the 1971 Gran Premio d'Espana. Nonetheless, with the weight of thousands of American readers resting on his shoulders, he set off, alone in his Elan, and drove non-stop ("on pure adrenaline") from London to Barcelona. In the early morning hours he spotted a Ferrari transporter outside a cafe. Inside, he recognized the Ferrari mechanic Guido Borsari and spoke to him. Borsari welcomed him warmly and gave him a Ferrari yearbook ("the kind Eoin Young now charges telephone numbers for!") and the would-be journalist was encouraged by this good omen.

At the circuit, Roebuck, the enthusiast, knew who everyone was. The problem was nobody knew him. "Very timidly, I set about introducing myself. And I remember the first two guys who were kind to me. One was Rob Walker, who at that time was associated with the Surtees team. He gave me a lot of advice. And the first of the drivers, whom I took to instantly because he was so immediately friendly and helpful, was Chris Amon.  And you know, people, colleagues of mine now, still don't believe it, that the first race I ever covered was a Grand Prix. I can't really believe it myself sometimes." 

The Car & Driver audience became believers, that first race report, chronicling Jackie Stewart's victory in his Tyrrell, was a success and Roebuck's career was launched. He finished that season with Car & Driver, then moved to a new British magazine, Competition Car, where he eventually became editor (and gave Maurice Hamilton his first break). When Competition Car folded in 1974 Roebuck spent the next year working with Quentin Spurring (who later became editor of Autosport) doing public relations work for Embassy, the sponsors of Graham Hill's Formula 1 team. That ended tragically when Hill, Tony Brise and others were killed in a plane crash. In 1976 Roebuck went to Autosport as Sports Editor, a move that coincided with the departure of the Grand Prix Editor, the American Pete Lyons. Roebuck lept into that breach and there he remains, a race reporter and intrepid Fifth Columnist. Though some of his youthful enthusiasm has worn off and his writing has a sharper edge, he tries to temper that with humour.

"I know I can be very sarcastic, and I suppose over the years I've certainly become more cynical. But in the right circumstances it amuses me a lot and I just hope it does other people. I always try to write the sort of piece that I would like to read.  Just as simple as that.  I mean, I've always felt in motor racing writing there's a comparative lack of humour. And I think a lot of what happens in motor racing is very funny, unconsciously. It's ripe for satire."

Though he is still entranced by the spectacle of racing cars at speed, Roebuck is not a 'nuts and bolts' man. He is fascinated by the personality traits of the characters in the sport, several of whom rub him the wrong way."I mean, I don't like brash, arrogant people.  I certainly would never want to become a friend of one. When you meet people, in any walk of life, you either find them simpatico, or you find they get your hackles rising. And drivers have done that to me for as long as I can remember. But I think the whole sport is infinitely more aggressive than it was.  I think there's a much more of a jungle feel about Formula 1 than there was 10 years ago."

Roebuck thinks commercialism is the villain here and finds the heart of the jungle is in the paddock. "When I was a kid, when I was a fan, it gave me a huge thrill to buy a paddock pass. Half the thrill of being there was actually being able to see your heroes and get their autographs, and that sort of thing, which is terribly difficult now. In most cases, the only way you can get into the paddock is via the wretched Paddock Club syndrome.  That's what I really resent.  This is the sort of financial aspect of the sport that I absolutely detest - the 'corporate guest' syndrome.

"I mean, it's some guy who sold more typewriters in the south-east between May and November last year who gets rewarded with a day out at the British Grand Prix.  I'm not saying he has no right to be there, he certainly does.  But I am saying it sickens me that he has access to places and perhaps to people, which the real fans, real fans, just don't have. I just find that very sad.

"Then there is the the motorhome thing. For a driver, it's very tempting once you have a motorhome, when you're not actually driving the car, to stay in there, because it gets you away from all the hassle. But I detest them! There is nothing I hate more than knocking on a motorhome door, and the door is opened about six inches to see who it is.  And when you sort of sidle in there it's like the classic western movie when a stranger comes into the saloon and all conversation stops.

"I think it's demeaning. You're made to feel like: 'What do you want? We can give you 15 seconds.' I don't think it's too strong to say that journalists are by and large treated with a fair amount of contempt by the people in racing.  Not, funnily enough, by the drivers, anything like as much as by some of the team managers. I think some of the Formula 1 team managers are among the rudest people I have ever met in my life!

"I think there are a lot of people who have Formula 1 teams who genuinely love racing and just want to do this with their lives.  But I also think there are a lot of people who regard it as just a means of making an extremely good living.  And a lot of them make an extremely good living from doing it spectacularly badly! 

"Some team owners I do like a lot. Ken Tyrrell is the classic case. The lovely thing about someone like Ken is that you can write something he thoroughly disagrees with, and he'll ring you up and complain about it and argue with you. But you know at the next race it will be completely forgotten and he'll come up to you and the first thing he'll say is: 'Have you heard the cricket scores?'

"I think team owners have a tendency to regard journalists as PR men for their team.  And I've said this repeatedly to them, 'You must understand that I'm not here to write that everything in the garden's rosy if it isn't.  I'm supposed to be here to write about this weekend, and all the teams this weekend, including your team, and if you screw something up in the last session, I'm not writing a press release for you. I'm here to write the story of what happened.'

"The PR people, I must confess, I look at a lot of them and I don't really know what they do.  But there are others whom I recognize do a good job and do it well. I think, inevitably,  there's a tendency among all journalists to think all PR people have a fairly easy way of life.  I think we have difficulty sometimes with that: there is somebody at the races employed to do nothing.  Taken there, and flown there and everything else, and it appears they do nothing beyond write a press release every day. I know there is more to it than that.  I just know from the year I had doing it there's no way in the world that I'd do that now.  Because so much of it is, I'm afraid, having to be friendly and polite and solicitous to people you probably can't stand!"

 

While Roebuck's strong opinions delight his readers, they sometimes leave those on the receiving end of his barbs less than amused, though he has never been involved in a physical altercation. The late Elio de Angelis once got into a shoving match with Denis Jenkinson over a DSJ item in Motor Sport. Another confrontation between an Italian journalist and  Michele Alboreto left the driver with a fat lip. But Roebuck has only ever been subjected to verbal use, or in the case of Ayrton Senna, silence. 

"That's not from choice, I hasten to say.  It's a curious thing in fact. In '85 I actually got on with him remarkably well.  And he had so much to say in those days, and he was very enthusiastic. There was something quite attractive about the way he was then, because he was the 'spoiler', he was shaking up the establishment.  He obviously had this blinding talent, that was a main reason why they didn't like him.  They didn't like his arrogance either, which was there even then. And of course it was the end of that year that everybody wanted Warwick in the other Lotus, apart from Senna, who simply vetoed it. 

"Now Derek is a friend of mine but I also thought he was the logical choice for the drive. Yet I think Senna had valid reasons for not wanting him there.  I mean, he was perfectly right about Lotus not having an ability to turn out two cars of equal standing.  I just felt for a guy who'd been in Formula 1 two years, it was a bit high-handed.  And that's what I wrote.

Well that was it. After that, I can remember going in the Lotus pit and Senna just looked right through me.

"But I can't really blame him. I mean, I think he puts people very much in two camps: you're for him or you're against him.  And I'm afraid I'm guilty of that too. This is a problem if you're a racing journalist. But people are only rude to me once.  And I never forget it until they apologize.  And if they apologize, then that's fine, and I'll shake hands with them and forget it. For instance, I get on fine now with Patrese, but I didn't speak to Patrese for years.

"I once asked him a question after a race.  And he was in a bad mood, and I get very annoyed with people who are in a bad mood all day and give everybody the benefit of it.  I think you should be capable of having an argument with somebody, and then be perfectly polite with the next person you meet.  I think that's not unreasonable.  You might not feel like having a long conversation, but you don't get in a bad temper talking to someone and then scream at the next person you see.  I don't like that.  So I don't know what put Patrese in this bad mood, but I asked him a question and he just turned around and said, 'Fuck off.'

"And in fact exactly the same thing happened with Piquet.  It's happened with Piquet with quite a few people, Maurice Hamilton among them. And I just thought, well you know, I can probably scrape by without talking to you."

Riccardo Patrese and Nigel Roebuck have since shaken hands and Roebuck now finds him "a very pleasant man." And he has had close friendships with several drivers over the years, notably Gilles Villeneuve, for whom he became a confidante. It was in a Fifth Column, entitled 'Bad Blood At Maranello', that Roebuck revealed the depth of Villeneuve's despair and his feud with Pironi that set the stage for the final chapter of the Villeneuve tragedy at Zolder in 1982.

"It might sound ridiculous, that a magazine article could have a huge effect on Grand Prix drivers, but I think sometimes we do have perhaps more influence than we sometimes appreciate.

And you know, I think that ours is a reasonably honourable profession. But when Pete Lyons left Autosport he wrote a sort of valedictory piece, explaining why he was leaving. He thought he was changing, and he didn't like this and he didn't like that and so on. He said at one point, 'The big problem with being on the inside is that you can see the seams.' 

"And that's absolutely right. It's an enormous disappointment.  It was to me when I first got into this.  You assume that anybody who's a Grand Prix driver has got to be incredibly interesting. And the realization that, in fact, they are just people, that some have a good sense of humour and some have none at all, some are barely capable of expressing themselves, and not simply because of maybe speaking a language which isn't their own.  A surprisingly high percentage appear to have very little interest in the outside world at all, beyond the business.  It's like show business people. It amazes me how unworldly a lot of them are.  And I don't mean that in any sort of fashionable sense.  Just how they have a relative unawareness of life."

Still, if a driver has anything of import to say, Roebuck has a knack of drawing it out and into his tape recorder. Unfortunately, he can't always put it all into print, something which bothers a man who confesses to having great difficulty keeping secrets.

"Not keeping a confidence, I don't think I've ever been guilty of betraying a confidence, but I'm hopeless at keeping secrets. And it can get absolutely maddening.  I remember doing an interview with Mansell at the height of the Mansell/Piquet feud.  And I mean some of the stuff that he came out with was absolute dynamite!  I thought, Jeez this is marvellous, unbelievable stuff.  Then when I played the tape back to write the story,  literally 70 percent was prefaced by 'off the record.' And what I was left with was actually not a whole lot."

Nevertheless, his off-the-record information is invaluable for providing an overview of the sport and the insightfulness he is noted for. "I think the way you really get insight is by being around a long time, so people get to know you, and eventually confide in you. They'll realize they told you something sensitive and you didn't blow it, and therefore it's okay to confide in you again.  That's where the real insight comes." 

While Roebuck's self-censored material might never see the light of day in print, he takes great delight in re-playing the taboo tapes for his own amusement. He finds himself particularly in need of comic relief during times of Grand Prix glut, a condition that reaches its peak shortly after mid-season.

"By then you've done Rio which is a long way, and Mexico and Montreal, they're sort of longish flights. And you're well into this thing of a race every two weeks, sometimes consecutive weekends, and that sort of thing.  You get to August and you've done nine, and there are still seven to go. Hockenheim is not terribly interesting, and overtaking is not easy in Budapest. It's the height of the holidays so the airports are chaotic. The planes are late and you just think, Jesus this is never ending!  But then I always sort of pick up again, at Spa.  Such a wonderful place.  And Monza, I love Monza.  I could very happily do without Spain and Portugal.  And then you finish the year. Japan is alright because the track's so fantastic.  And everybody loves Adelaide because it has this terrific atmosphere.

"I think, by and large, we are enthusiasts getting paid for doing what we love. Alright, we want to make a living out of it and you can make quite a good living out of it. Sure there are easier ways of earning what we earn. But I think there has to be a love of what we do or else we just would not put up with the travel and put up with occasionally being treated fairly contemptuously!"

Over the years Roebuck has built up a network of colleagues in the press with whom he shares information. This pooling of resources is international in scope and he regularly confers with people like Pino Allievi, Heinz Pruller and Jean Louis Moncet. Roebuck has great respect for them (and the feeling is mutual), though he thinks the various nationalities tend to have certain character traits.

"The Fench press is incredibly chauvinistic, I think. I find it quite endearing, I'm not offering it as a criticism. But they are also quicker to turn on their own than any other press.  You find for instance, that some of them are incredibly loyal to Prost, and I must say I'm as guilty of that as anybody. But then you get the other side, the other French, who built Prost up into a hero and now are busy writing that he's finished. I think they destroy their own heroes quicker than any other nation. 

"The Italians are the most fun by a long way, because they just revel in this sort of Machiavallian intrigue and they see meanings in everything, and everything is of great significance.  Piccinini's wearing a red jacket today, which means bad news for Tambay, or whatever.  And sometimes I just find myself laughing, but the Italian mentality is a law unto itself.  They're also the most cynical of the lot and what they're not is chauvinistic.  They tend to be very straight with themselves about Italian drivers.  If they think the guy's no good, they will say so.  They tend to analyze their own drivers very deeply.

"I don't think the Brits are particularly chauvinistic either.  I think the daily paper journalists are...I was going to say they're guilty of having a Nigel Mansell complex, but you can't really blame them because presumably that's what their editors want.  After every practice session there's the sight of 8 or 10 British journalists standing there, obediently queueing up to speak to Nigel, all going to get exactly the same quote. So, it's for that same reason I never, ever ask questions at press conferences. Because I always think, why the hell do you want to ask a question and then share the answer with the world.  If you've got a question, then ask it in private. 

"The photographic equivalent of this is about 15 or 20 minutes before the start of a race, when it seems that 90 percent of all the photographers set off for the first corner.  And they stand there like that, jammed in together, and they're all going to take exactly the same picture.  And I just think that seems so incredibly unimaginative.  And that's why I so admire a bloke like Bernard Asset.

"A few years ago he took a picture in Rio which I thought was extraordinary.  It must have taken him hours to get to where he got to.  Walked half way up a mountain.  And instead of having the traditional first corner shot at Rio, he was miles away, but he had the start area and the first corner, and it was the most striking photograph. I thought Christ, you know, here's a bloke thinking about what's going to look good. Asset uses his imagination and, in fact, I think of him as a genius."